Last year, we launched a new premium feature called Mentions, which notifies you whenever papers uploaded to Academia.edu mention your name. You can also make these mentions public to demonstrate the impact your work is having on scholarship and science.

We built Mentions, in part, because citation data — increasingly an important part of tenure and promotion decisions — misses many forms of impact. An academic might acknowledge you for providing input on a draft, or a colleague might refer to your forthcoming work, but without a full citation; others may cite your published work in a thesis, draft, foreign language, syllabus or bibliography. Many citation counts, such as those generated by Google Scholar, miss these alternative forms of impact.

We wanted to know what percentage of Academia Mentions are missed by Google Scholar. So we randomly selected 77 Academia users who have made between 5–20 of their mentions public, and cross-checked them with Google Scholar. We found that about 43% of Academia Mentions are not known to Google Scholar.

Impact is multidimensional, and impact statistics should reflect this multidimensionality.

Academia’s mission is to make all research available for free to everyone in the world. Upgrading to premium is a way to support our mission and help make all scholarship and science easily and freely accessible to everyone, not just those affiliated with well-endowed institutions.

If you don’t see Mentions in your Academia.edu navigation bar, that’s probably because we haven’t rolled out this premium feature to you yet. We expect a full site-wide rollout within a couple of months. If you’d like early access, let us know at premium-support@academia.edu! If you have any other questions about Academia.edu, or you’d like to write a guest blog post for us, let us know at support@academia.edu.